When I took my mom to Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, she stood in the middle of the soaring, golden space and looked over at me. "I feel funny," she said. I knew what she meant.
To stand inside a building that our fellow humans dreamed up and created and designed and built, stone by stone or tile by tile or brick by brick, a building that serves a function, yes, but is beautiful because its creators and craftspeople know our souls crave beauty same as our bodies need air and water, that? That makes me feel something I can't name, too.
I felt it again when I stepped into the Grand Hall at Michigan Central Station in Detroitand tilted my head to take in the 55 foot high arches with their 29,000 Guastavino ceiling tiles, the larger than life windows where the June sunshine lit up the great room with a glow that left me feeling like we were walking into a dream.
This building. This terrible scar that bore witness to an incredible city's near-collapse, this icon that told the story of decades of tribulation: even at its most wretched, its most broken and shattered, it held the story of Detroit's greatness. It held the stories of the rivers of people who flowed through it, going to work and to war, on holiday and on to new lives. It held hope and it held promise and I was drawn to it from my first time in the city.
I couldn't resist taking photos, finding the great, jagged holes open to its cavernous, dark interior, the spiky barbed wire, the sheer hulk of it all a magnet. This former glory stood naked and ravaged, testament to what can happen to any of us.
And it stands today, I still can't believe my own eyes, a testament to what we humans can achieve, to what we can dream and bring into reality with our very own hands.
Building Michigan Central in 1913 was a feat. After being abandoned in 1988 when it was left alone to stand against the elements, to let scrappers lay it bare, to let artists leave their mark, bringing it back to life in 2024 is a miracle, a monumental transformation by Ford Motor Company (and you can bet the next time I’m looking for a car I’m looking for one by the company that has committed 949 million dollars to this campus!).
It should have been gone by now, its proud facade knocked into a mountain of rubble only that the city of Detroit didn't have the money to carry out the demolition that was decided on. Thank God.
I felt funny when I walked in and swiveled my head in every direction to take it all in, to let the splendor of its blazing new life quench something inside me.
I fell madly in love with Detroit my first time there, with the people and the possibility (and the food). I could see, it was so clear if only you went, that it was far from over, that the city would come roaring back, and oh how it's done that in grand fashion. And now the world can see and I'm proud to bursting of this place and so very very happy to have had even the tiniest part with the work I did with my own hands on a house not so far from here.
The Dream Is Now,
someone painted in huge letters on the roof of a house just across from the station some years ago. I tattooed it on my arm a couple years ago in a shop in sight of the station while the works were being done.
The dream is now.